English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Seen From Above(2009) Wylder, Sarah; Plumly, Stanley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Seen from Above" is largely about being out of place and being an outsider. Settings for these poems range from laboratories to city parks. A tropical hummingbird gets lost and finds its way to Wisconsin. A pack of coyotes moves into an urban cemetery. A clone of an extinct species paws at the glass of its cage. The humans in these poems are as uncomfortable in their own skin as on the streets of a foreign city. The fat woman dreams of being someone else. The fake saints, even in the afterlife, still struggle with ambiguous roles and questions without answers. A young woman sees a dead body and an extinct bird, but no one will hear her alarm.Item Postcolonial Refashionings: Reading Forms, Reading Novels(2009) Comorau, Nancy Alla; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reads the postcolonial novel through a lens of novel theory, examining the ways in which the postcolonial novel writes a new chapter in the history of the novel. I explore how Postcolonial writers deploy--even as they remodel--the form of the British novel, which provides them a unique avenue for expressing national and individual historical positions and for imaginatively renegotiating their relationships to the canon and the Commonwealth, past and present. In doing so, they remake the forms they have inherited into the genre of the postcolonial novel. The novel, due to its connection to modernity, the nation, and the formation of the subject, holds different possibilities for postcolonial writers than other forms. My dissertation answers readings of postcolonial texts, which, while often superb in their interpretation of the political, fail to focus on genre. In a fashion, postcolonial novels are read as anthropological works, providing glimpses into a culture, and in a peculiar way the novel comes to operate as the native informant. Given the proliferation of the Anglophone postcolonial novel, I argue that it is important that we consider how the postcolonial novel renders established genres into new forms. I focus on a set of postcolonial novels that specifically engage with canonical British novels, calling attention to the fact that while they share much with their predecessors, they function differently than the novels that have come before them. Unlike early postcolonial arguments about empire "writing back" to the center, which position postcolonial and "English" writers in an antipodal power struggle, I argue that the Anglophone postcolonial novel is at once a descendent of the British novel and a genre unto itself--forming a new limb from the British novel's branch. In doing so, these novels perform new ways of writing modernity, the nation, and the subject. Working from a Bakhtinian theory of the modern novel as a form that creates newness, I demonstrate how postcolonial writers use the history and tradition of the British novel to write, revise, and refashion the novel in English.Item The Prescribed Burn(2009) Wirstiuk, Laryssa Andrea; Feitell, Merrill; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Veda is a young Ukrainian-American woman from New Jersey who is creative, insightful, and observant. Her concerns are ordinary yet pressing, and she struggles with obsession, physical distance, and personal identity. Though she loves home, life forces her to leave again and again. Veda is moved by Wildwood, the Pine Barrens, the PATH train, and the Meadowlands. Memories of her favorite landscape ground her, no matter where she happens to be. Veda's parents are a steady, dependable presence, but her peer relationships are her greatest source of interest and inner conflict. Madsy is her best friend and confidante, Arthur is her first love, and Theo inspires such tumultuous passion that he nearly ruins her. Art is her redemptive force. In order to grow, Veda must simultaneously destroy and create.Item Feigned Histories: Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Spanish Chivalric Romance(2009) Crowley, Timothy D.; Hamilton, Donna B.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study re-evaluates Sidney's method and purpose for inventing Arcadia, through analyzing his fiction in tandem with the Spanish genre of chivalric "feigned history." It introduces the new perspective that Arcadia exploits structural and thematic focus on clandestine marriage in Feliciano de Silva's feigned Chronicle of Florisel de Niquea, Part Three (1535), as rendered in translation by Jacques Gohory as "Book" Eleven in the French Amadis cycle (1554). Old Arcadia follows that chivalric paradigm in Books One through Three; then it employs motifs from ancient prose fiction by Apuleius and Heliodorus in Books Four and Five to amplify plot conflict tied to the protagonist lovers' secret marriages. Imitation of Spanish pastoral romances by Montemayor and Gil Polo in Old Arcadia's Eclogues supplements the work's primary narrative plane and also facilitates Protestant aesthetic impressions of marriage and affective individual piety. Shifts in literary source material occur as means to extend and enrich thematic focus and narrative poetics of those first three Books. Sidney's narrative establishes admiratio for its protagonist lovers and reader complicity with them, while imposing comic and tragic distance from other main characters. These observations revise dominant critical assumptions about Old Arcadia. Building upon its chivalric source material, Sidney's fiction increases verisimilitude and invents its own rhetorical focus on dynastic union through clandestine marriage. This study observes for the first time that political tension and legal debate in Old Arcadia's conclusion revolve around that issue. Sidney's fiction figures forth a succession crisis contingent upon legal complications with the issue of clandestine marriage in Arcadia, in a manner congruous with Genevan, French, and Tridentine legal reform on that matter, as well as with England's unique legal situation regarding secret marriage. The story's intellectual focus on justice and equity complements its author's concern with the case of his uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. While Sidney composed Arcadia, his own political and economic prospects remained largely contingent upon Leicester's secret marriage. This study opens new avenues for research on continuity in Sidney's oeuvre and on New Arcadia's influence in English prose fiction and drama of the 1590s and the seventeenth century.Item Romantic Vacancy: British Women's Poetry, Skepticism, and Epistemology(2009) Singer, Katherine; Fraistat, Neil; Wang, Orrin N. C.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent scholarship on Romantic women's writing has frequently been preoccupied with the loss, suffering, and sensibility central to women's poetry. My dissertation investigates how four women poets after the French Revolution eventually react against the cult of emotion that trapped them as primarily feeling subjects. Rather than passively depicting absence, they employ various figures of vacancy, a poetic tactic that productively and actively empties out habituated language and the regnant ideologies of the day. In vacating reified thought, women poets more importantly reconceptualize the Enlightenment thinking subject, rejecting two dominant modes of thought--sensibility and progressive reason--instead experimenting with anhedonia, non-meaning, and counterfactuals. Because these women poets view language as necessarily imposing structures of thinking, their varying poetics propose home-grown epistemologies, in dialogue with English and continental philosophy as well as Romantic theories about the revolutionary potential of language. Moreover, since these poets all share a belief in the intimate connection between poetic form and cognition, my chapters reveal how the poets' formal techniques reify, alter, and create ways of thinking. Though they often work from traditional forms, they make use of repetition, caesura, and footnotes to alter the way poems make and unmake meaning. Even more broadly, these poems about thought do not fall prey to Romanticism's tendency to escape from history into the imagination, yet neither do women poets allow themselves to be confined by either their historical place or their embodied identities. Instead, Romanticism might be defined as a movement that employs non-understanding as a means of keeping ideology, and the history that ideology presupposes, at bay. My first chapter defines vacancy as a trope for linguistic or cognitive breakdown, and my next two chapters on Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson explore how these writers engage respectively with Kantian ideas of free beauty and empiricist epistemologies about idiots. My chapter on Felicia Hemans discusses her use of brain-based models of the mind to create perceptual overload that challenges imperialist thinking, and the final piece demonstrates how Maria Jane Jewsbury uses images to dislodge reified visual representations of gendered or colonial landscapes and bodies.Item Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Gothic(2009) Brookshire, David; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation participates in a developing body of Romantic criticism that seeks to trace the crucial, yet uncertain, relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic. Recent studies argue persuasively for the influence of gothic aesthetics on the major poets of the Romantic era, yet surprisingly little attention has been given to Percy Bysshe Shelley, for whom, more than any other Romantic, the gothic sensibility arguably provided the most powerful and lasting influence during the course of his career. Shelley's earliest publications, including his two gothic novels--Zastrozzi, a Romance and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian--have received scant critical attention and demand an analysis that approaches these early works with the same theoretical rigor that his mature poetry receives. I employ the insights of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to interrogate my distinction between the Shelleyan subject of Romanticism and the Shelleyesque subject of Gothicism. Where the Shelleyan gaze finds synthesis, desire, pleasure, sublimity, benevolence, and being; the Shelleyesque gaze finds antagonism, drive, jouissance, monstrosity, perversion, and lack. Rather than an undisciplined juvenile phase of Shelley's development, the Shelleyesque continues to operate throughout his mature poetry in unsettling and provocative ways, particularly in works such as Prometheus Unbound--generally considered to be Shelley's most idealistic attempt to transcend the political, sexual, and psychological antagonisms associated with the gothic tradition--further complicating the uncanny relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic.Item Antler(2009) O'Connor, Kimberly; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in Antler are perhaps best described through the methods used to write them. The earliest poems in the collection--those written first, such as "Before" and "Joint"--are attempts to linger in an event or memory, to allow the imagination to elaborate and recreate without any particular end in mind. Some of the poems--"The Lake," for example, or "Long Black Veil"--are explorations in juxtaposition and layering. Later poems, like "To Someone," are focused on incorporating sound and song at the earliest stages of composition and onward. Many of these poems seek to capture family stories. Others explore "family" in a larger sense: "our" (people's) connections to each other, to art or nature, and to wonder and disaster.Item A Precipice of Inches: Poems and Translations(2009) Leichum, Laura; Weiner, Joshua; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection represents an enduring fascination with how language connects sense and perception, whether it be a response to a work of art or an attempt to describe the condition of vertigo. Through lyric and narrative under lyric pressure, these poems explore different ways of making experience manifest by invoking memory, both personal and cultural. In some poems, memory transforms experience or vice versa, whereas others attempt to reconcile experience and memory and what may have been lost and gained over time. In addition, German language and literature are a constant touchstone. The translations included in the middle section reflect an interest in literary translation as its own creative project as well as its influence.Item Strange Capacities(2009) Nyman, Melissa Suzanne; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The poems in this collection draw on various events, ranging from a family member's violent death to natural disasters and phenomena. The speakers here repeatedly confront how one unique experience can permanently alter the psyche. As such, these poems often rely on an intense curiosity about the natural world, as well as the mysterious yet infinitely documented realm of the human body.Item Scripting Public Performance: The Representation of Officeholding in Early Modern Literature(2008) Hull, Helen Louise; Hamilton, Donna B.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study argues that early modern English dramatists and prose writers were reevaluating the subject's offices. Officeholders appear frequently on the early modern English stage, in roles ranging from lord mayors to constables to lord chancellors. Widely circulated prose tracts established officeholders' authority and defined their duties. Dramatists who staged officeholders, along with men who wrote officeholding manuals, drew on humanist and classical republican concepts of citizenship in depicting officeholders; they were also responsive to contemporary religious and political pressures. They were redefining the very parameters of office by redescribing officeholding as a site of political representation I begin by establishing the investment subjects had in officeholding as evidenced by the proliferation of contemporary officeholding manuals. My first chapter canvases the range of manuals as well as their socio-political context. I then focus on William Lambard's Eirenarcha (1581), a manual for justices of the peace. By emphasizing that the justice is duty-bound to God and to the common law as well as to the monarch, Lambard raises questions of obligation and representation for officeholders. In chapter two, I consider representations of justices of the peace in Anthony Munday's Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, William Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor and Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humor (all three c. 1597-98). By juxtaposing officeholding with quasi-feudal and chivalric models of service, these dramatists define what officeholding was not and what it could be. In my third chapter, I consider depictions of the lord chancellor in Anthony Munday's Play of Sir Thomas More (c. 1592-94) and in Henry VIII (1613), by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. I argue that these plays challenge the claims made by early modern magistrates to be ministers of justice. The last chapter considers scenes featuring London's lord mayor in Shakespeare's Richard III (c.1593), Thomas Heywood's Edward IV (1599), and Heywood's 1 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1604). I read these plays in the light of contemporary disputes over free speech in Parliament. By asking how freely the lord mayor can speak, these plays associate office itself with the representation of subjects.